Saturday, February 10, 2018

Apropos
my recent posts about Jane Austen alluding to Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan" in the
Pinny passage in Persuasion, which I
claim points to Anne Elliot’s sexual reawakening, I confess that I have a very
spotty knowledge of Romantic poetry. Which is why I’m surprised that, in
following up on my latest post on that subject, I’ve now come upon yet another Austen
allusion to another famous Romantic Era poem, which, as far as I can tell, no
Austen or Romantic poetry scholar has described as such.

The
allusion I stumbled upon is foregrounded in the passage in Chapter 23, which I was
looking at in following up on the significance of the word “recollection”
(i.e., memory) in regard to Anne’s sexual reawakening. We read Anne’s ecstatic
reflections after she and Wentworth are at last reunited:

“There could not be an objection. There could be only the
most proper alacrity, a most obliging compliance for public view; and smiles
reined in and spirits dancing in private
rapture. In half a minute Charles was at the bottom of Union Street again,
and the other two proceeding together: and soon words enough had passed between
them to decide their direction towards the comparatively quiet and retired
gravel walk, where the power of conversation would make the present hour a
blessing indeed, and prepare itfor all the immortality which the happiest
RECOLLECTIONS of their own future lives could bestow. There they exchanged
again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure
everything, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and
estrangement. There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy,
perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender,
more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth, and
attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting. And there, as they
slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing
neither sauntering politicians, bustling housekeepers, flirting girls, nor
nursery-maids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and
acknowledgements, and especially in those explanations of what had directly
preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in
interest. All the little variations of the last week were gone through; and of
yesterday and today there could scarcely be an end.”

That
passage is saturated with romantic “recollection” in various forms, and here is
the excerpt containing the allusion I spotted:
“prepare
[the present hour]for all the immortality which the happiest recollections
of their own future lives could bestow.”

My eye
was caught by that sentence, because something was strange in it, which
required me to pause and parse it. What exactly are “recollections of their own
future lives” –shouldn’t it be
“recollections of their own past
lives”? I recognized this immediately as a poetic reversal of expectation by
JA, a deliberate paradox to convey how Anne, in her bliss, has come unstuck in
time.

That
suggested to me that this was likely itself an allusion to another poem (by
Coleridge?). So I Googled “immortality” and “recollections” together, and I was
immediately rewarded in the search results with the title of a poem as famous
as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, a poem with which Jane Austen was surely familiar,
but by a different famous Romantic poet!:

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood” by William Wordsworth

When I then checked the JASNA website, I was led to
Susan Allen Ford’s
Editor’s Note to the latest issue of Persuasions
Online, in which Susan wrote the following about the theme of the JASNA AGM
held in October 2017:

“As the
world celebrated Jane Austen on the 200th anniversary of her death with
banknotes and benches, exhibitions and eulogies, teas and tours, members of JASNA
gathered in Huntington Beach for the AGM. The theme was fitting: “Jane
Austen in Paradise: Intimations of Immortality”. That title, of course,
alludes to both Rudyard Kipling’s comic poem “Jane’s Marriage,” in which Jane
Austen arrives in Paradise, and William Wordsworth’s more meditative “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Two
hundred years of afterlife might lead either to lightness of heart or to some
solemn and philosophical musings, worthy of Fanny Price at her most
rhapsodic. But “immortality” is a word that neither Jane Austen’s
characters nor her narrators seem comfortable with.

A
search of an online concordance finds only one instance, near the conclusion of
her last completed novel, Persuasion, as the narrator overflows
with powerful feelings of affection and delight in the happiness of her two
lovers: “soon words enough had passed between them to decide their
direction towards the comparatively quiet and retired gravel-walk, where the
power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed; and prepare for it all the immortality which the
happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow.”

Here
“immortality” is a natural sequel to “blessing,” redeeming the sorrows and
losses of Anne and “immortality” is also teasingly parodic, a way of poking
gentle fun at the transcendent emotions of the pair. In addition to the
celebratory comedy of overfull emotion, “immortality” also picks up the novel’s
emphasis on time, its expansions and contractions, its confusions of past,
present, future. In this passage the narrator looks forward from “the
present hour” to their “future lives,” in which they will happily recollect the
past (this present moment), which will then be transformed to the timelessness
of immortality…” END QUOTE FROM
FORD’S EDITOR’S NOTE

Even though Ford quotes Wordsworth’s poem title in
the first paragraph, and Austen’s echoing narration in the second, she does not
connect them; nor does she claim that Austen intentionally alluded to
Wordsworth. That does not surprise me, because mainstream literary scholars
rarely assert the existence of an allusion without explicit evidence, and this
is not explicit, although, to my mind, to paraphrase that other lover of
Romantic poetry, Marianne Dashwood, the allusion “was in every word implied, but never professedly
declared.”

I felt certain, especially in the context of all
the Romantic poetic allusions by Austen in Persuasion (and, for that
matter, in Mansfield Park), including the veiled allusion to Kubla Khan.
So I dove into the scholarly databases to see if I could discern its meaning from
articles which might give hints to explain why JA would point to Wordsworth’s
famous poem at that romantic climactic point in Persuasion.

I wound up finding several very interesting
articles, which will all require a great deal of followup study in order for me
to arrive at any sort of confident interpretation. However, from my quick skimthrough
of those articles, my tentative
hypothesis is that the key clue is the strange reversal of temporality in Anne
Elliot’s blurring of past present and future in the midst of her bliss. As far
as I can tell so far, Wordsworth’s poem
is itself known for a comparable blurring of time in the heart and mind. All of
which fits so perfectly and ironically with Anne’s worry for Benwick’s
overindulgence in Romantic poetry – the joke is that it is Anne who repeatedly
resorts to Romantic poetry as her heart (and her sexual body) lurches awake
after 8 ½ years of hibernation.

I will return with whatever I come up with, once I
have completed that review, but at least wanted to get the basic idea out there
in the interim.

I’m back
(as my famous namesake famously said) to provide even more textual evidence to
support my claim that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was actually a key allusive text
for Persuasion, primarily because it symbolizes
the sexual reawakening of Anne Elliot which JA, in breaking new fictional
ground, depicts in Anne’s stream (all puns intended, vis a vis Kubla Khan) of
sexual consciousness.

To
begin, I remind you that during the past few weeks, I’ve explained the intense
sexual charge I see in three separate passages in Persuasion:

First, at
the end of Chapter 9, when Wentworth catches Anne entirely by surprise when he
rescues Anne from little Walter Musgrove’s “little sturdy hands fastened around
her neck”:

“[Anne’s]
sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even
thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered
feelings. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief, the manner, the
silence in which it had passed, the little particulars of the circumstance,
with the conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making
with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to
testify that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced such a
confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover
from, till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over
her little patient to their cares, and leave the room. She could not stay. It
might have been an opportunity of watching the loves and jealousies of the
four--they were now altogether; but she could stay for none of it. It was
evident that Charles Hayter was not well inclined towards Captain Wentworth.
She had a strong impression of his having said, in a vext tone of voice, after
Captain Wentworth's interference, "You ought to have minded me, Walter; I
told you not to teaze your aunt;" and could comprehend his regretting that
Captain Wentworth should do what he ought to have done himself. But neither Charles
Hayter's feelings, nor anybody's feelings, could interest her, till she had a
little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of
being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was, and it required
a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.”

Second,
in Chapter 11, when we read the following narration describing the last stage
of the road trip from Uppercross to Lyme, narration which I claim is filtered
through Anne’s poetry-infused mind:

“The
scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive
sweeps of country, and still more, its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark
cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands, make it the happiest spot
for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the
woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with
its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and
orchards of luxuriant growth, declare that many a generation must have passed
away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such
a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more
than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these
places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme
understood.”

The
above passage, which already contains imagery reflecting Anne’s thawing
sexuality, also carries as its echo the even more intensely sexual passage in
Coleridge’s poem which would have been recently known to at least some of Austen’s
contemporary readers:

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slantedDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her demon-lover!And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil
seething,As if this earth in fast thick pants were
breathing,A mighty fountain momently was forced:

And
third, in Chapter 23, Austen shows that sexual energy is already building
inside Anne’s body as she debates gender and constancy with Harville --- but then,
after she reads Wentworth’s letter, the floodgates open, and she once again finds herself at
Pinny, so to speak, enveloped in the waters (hormones) that rushed over her
heart, mind, soul, and body:

“Such a
letter was not to be soon recovered from. Half an hour's solitude and
reflection might have tranquillised her; but the ten minutes only which now
passed before she was interrupted, with all the restraints of her situation,
could do nothing towards tranquillity. Every moment rather brought fresh
agitation. It was an overpowering happiness. And before she was beyond THE
FIRST STAGE OF FULL SENSATION, Charles, Mary, and Henrietta, all came in."

So
there you have three passages in the same vein depicting Anne’s sexual arousal,
to which I will now add a fourth, which I only found because I took note of Coleridge’s
subtitle for Kubla Khan:

“A vision
in a dream. A Fragment.”

Knowing
JA’s predilection for using unusual keywords to tag her allusions, I wondered
whether she might have picked up on that powerful word “vision” somewhere in Persuasion other than the Pinny scene,
in order to further point to Coleridge’s poem. And guess what! That word picked
me up and carried me straight to another, fourth passage in Persuasion in which Anne is caught up in
Coleridgean feelings. And wait till you see the bonus in understanding which identifying
this fourth passage yields!

The
word “visions” appears in the midst of the narrative in Chapter 20 (therefore, after
the Pinny passage, but before the White Hart Inn scene). The scene depicts Anne’s
brief conversation with Wentworth prior to the concert at Bath, and it gets
interesting right after he thrills her with his negative comments about
Benwick’s engagement to Louisa. It’s not just that he criticizes it as a
mismatch of minds, it’s that Louisa gets the short end of the mismatch from
Wentworth, although he does also criticize Benwick’s very short memory and
therefore inconstancy toward his previous fiancée, Harville’s late sister Fanny:

“Either
from the consciousness, however, that his friend [Benwick[ had recovered, or
from other consciousness, he went no farther; and Anne who, in spite of the
agitated voice in which the latter part had been uttered, and in spite of all
the various noises of the room, the almost ceaseless slam of the door, and
ceaseless buzz of persons walking through, had distinguished every word, was struck, gratified, confused, and
beginning to breathe very quick, and feel an hundred things in a moment. It
was impossible for her to enter on such a subject….”

Note that
Anne is so “gratified” by Wentworth’s speech, that she herself immediately falls
once more into an aroused, disordered state which might have reminded her of
how she felt when Wentworth rescued her from the boy on her neck in Chapter 9,
but which, as her next words show, definitely reminds her of that other erotic,
Wentworth-infused moment in Chapter 11, because look at what she brings up next:

“…and
yet, after a pause, feeling the necessity of speaking, and having not the
smallest wish for a total change, she only deviated so far as to say--"You
were a good while at Lyme, I think?"

In her
own mind, she is suddenly back on that carriage ride past Pinny, reexperiencing
the burn of passion! And now note what she says after Wentworth responds without
particular passion, not taking the bait she has dangled in hopes of a different
response from him:

"About
a fortnight. I could not leave it till Louisa's doing well was quite
ascertained. I had been too deeply concerned in the mischief to be soon at
peace. It had been my doing, solely mine. She would not have been obstinate if
I had not been weak. The country round Lyme is very fine. I walked and rode a
great deal; and the more I saw, the more I found to admire."

"I
should very much like to see Lyme again," said Anne.

"Indeed!
I should not have supposed that you could have found anything in Lyme to
inspire such a feeling. The horror and distress you were involved in, the
stretch of mind, the wear of spirits! I should have thought your last
impressions of Lyme must have been strong disgust."

Anne
has tried to entice him into going back to Lyme with her, but again he has not
responded in kind. And now here is the punch line which shows that Anne persists
in trying to convey to Wentworth the sexual thrill she experienced as they
passed by Pinny:

"The
last hours were certainly very painful," replied Anne; "but when pain
is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a
place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering,
nothing but suffering, which was by no means the case at Lyme. We were only in
anxiety and distress during the last two hours, and previously there had been a
great deal of enjoyment. So much novelty and beauty! I have travelled so
little, that every fresh place would be interesting to me; but there is real
beauty at Lyme; and in short" (with a faint blush at some recollections),
"altogether my impressions of the place are very agreeable."

Her
impressions of the place are very agreeable? A faint blush at some recollections?
What she almost says, but then pulls back, is that she nearly had an orgasm as they
rode in the bouncing carriage past Pinny, and the landscape kindled her flame
of desire! After Wentworth walks away, Anne’s mind then feverishly parses the
romantic significance she sees in what has just transpired between her and
Wentworth:

“She
could not contemplate the change as implying less. He must love her. These were
thoughts, with their attendant visions, which occupied and flurried her too
much to leave her any power of observation; and she passed along the room
without having a glimpse of him, without even trying to discern him. When their
places were determined on, and they were all properly arranged, she looked
round to see if he should happen to be in the same part of the room, but he was
not; her eye could not reach him; and the concert being just opening, she must
consent for a time to be happy in a humbler way.”

“With their
attendant VISIONS”? No, Wentworth did not get a charge out of riding past
Pinny, it was only Anne – but she does not realize this! It is only she who, like Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, but without the need for opium, experiences “visions” as she gazes
at Pinny, which had “given a great deal of (sexual) enjoyment”, so much so that
she blushes to recollect it some time afterwards!

By the way, Jill Heydt-Stevenson almost got
there 23 years ago on why Anne blushes. In her first scholarly publication which
discussed sex in Austen’s novels, JHS gave her interpretation of Anne’s “faint
blush at some recollections”:

“Towards
the end of the text, Anne says outright that "'when pain is over, the
remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less
for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but
suffering ... but there is real beauty at Lyme: and in short' (with a faint
blush at some recollections) 'altogether my impressions of the place are very
agreeable"'. Anne blushes because she has inadvertently referred to her
own beauty there, to Elliot's admiration of her beauty, and to Wentworth's
acknowledgment of Elliot's admiration. The events at Lyme gradually replace the
troubled events of eight years before; Lyme itself becomes an erotic landscape,
as Anne and Wentworth alternately blush, redden, and glow while recollecting
the past, and in this sense it becomes a restorative, as it colours their faces
and strengthens their constitutions.”

As I’ve always said, Heydt-Stevenson deserved
enormous credit for having made it impossible for the Janeite world to continue
to ignore sex in Austen’s novels, and so, in 1995, how could she have
recognized everything I’ve written about, above, with the benefit of hindsight?
But it’s worth noting that had JHS was really close. Had she thought further about
her ingenious idea that “Lyme itself becomes an erotic landscape”, she’d have
realized that she was nearly there, and all she needed to do was to recognize
that Jane Austen gave Anne Elliot a sexual life in Persuasion.

But
there’s one last wonderful strand in this rich braid of Austenian subtext. It
was only as I was finalizing this post, that something tickled my memory, and I
searched for other usages of “faint blush” in Austen’s fiction, and that was when
the search engine enabled me to catch Jane Austen in a brilliant act of
intertextual genius – as she wrote about Anne’s “faint blush”, she was slyly recollecting
what she had written nearly four years earlier, in P&P!

Specifically,
Anne in the conversation with Wentworth at the concert is in virtually the
identical situation as Elizabeth Bennet was when she speaks with Darcy at
Pemberley, not long after he has surprised and electrified her by being so attentive
and kind to her and the Gardiners:

“With a
glance, [Elizabeth] saw, that [Darcy] had lost none of his recent civility;
and, to imitate his politeness, she began as they met to admire the beauty of
the place [Pemberley]; but she had not got beyond the words
"delightful," and "charming," when some unlucky
recollections obtruded, and she fancied that praise of Pemberley from her,
might be mischievously construed. Her colour changed, and she said no more.”

Those
unlucky recollections which made Elizabeth blush because they “might be
mischievously construed” are, I now realize, exactly the same as those which
Anne blushed at – whereas Anne became aroused by riding past Pinny with Wentworth
on the road to Lyme, Elizabeth was recollecting her own strong sexual arousal
upon first seeing Pemberley, both outside and inside.

So,
while JA wrote P&P before she read Kubla Khan, she recognized in Coleridge’s
poem a perfect addition to her other scenes of Anne’s sexual arousal in Persuasion.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

In Janeites, Elissa Schiff wrote: Now,
let me immediately say that I DO NOT find intense sexuality to be the
prevailing energy of JA's fiction, although sensuality, sexual attraction,
etc.. are certainly central themes woven throughout her fiction.

Nancy Mayer replied: Most
romances --Boy meets girl, etc -- usually has sexual tension, sexual
attraction, and some degree of sensuality. However, romances range
from "sweet and clean" to those that are rated R. I do not
think Jane Austen wrote R rated fiction.

Diane Reynolds chimed in: I
think we’re all agreed that Austen is not R rated. She’s more like those old
Hitchcock films—Vertigo, North by Northwest, where what is suggested is much
steamier than what is shown. Censorship in both cases.

Nancy: Why
censorship? Why not taste and preferences? Not every one wants to read or write
about orgasms and vaginas.

Nancy, relax
--- may I suggest, dear lady, that you do protest too much. If you do not see,
or choose to see, the sexual subtext, that’s your right, but to each his or her
own. 😉

Just to
be clear on my own position:

I do
believe that Jane Austen meant to repeatedly depict Anne Elliot’s internal experience
of sexual arousal; and I also believe that JA did something similar in
depicting Catherine Morland’s dark and stormy gothic night in her room at the
Abbey, when she learned to love “a hyacinth”, whereupon Henry suggest she may
one day learn to love a rose. She also subtly shows us Elizabeth Bennet’s less
powerful sexual charge as she gazes at Pemberley, its exterior, its contents,
and its master. And she suggests Fanny’s sexual panic in the Sotherton gardens.

But even
I do not claim that there is any depiction, whether overt or covert, of sex
between characters in Austen’s novels. Although…I have at times wondered
whether the tete-a-tetes which occur very early in S&S (between John and
Fanny Dashwood), P&P (between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet), and Emma (between Knightley
and Mrs. Weston)_…. https://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/12/mr-bennet-mrs-bennets-tete-tete-at.html …might be post-coital. There’s a relaxed
intimate quality to these three conversations about the heroine, which would
fit perfectly with two mature adults lying in each other’s arms. Of course, it
makes us gag to think of the vile John and Fanny in the sack, but it makes
sense – part of her power over him would certainly have been sexual – the same,
for that matter, with Lucy and Robert (and Lucy and Edward). And that there was
a sexual charge between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet is as much as explicitly stated in
P&P – and we can see Mr. Bennet’s teasing withholding of the secret of his
having visited Netherfield as foreplay, designed to temporarily cure Mrs.
Bennet’s headache just long enough for some magic to be rekindled between them
again –even if she was definitely not wanting to get pregnant again!

But even
though there is no depiction or description of an actual sexual act in her
fiction, there is nonetheless a near constant subliminal aura of winking at sex
in the characters’ (and the narrator’s) words, via sexual innuendo—this is
exactly the same as in so many of Shakespeare’s plays, and I’ve demonstrated in
many instances JA’s deployment of the same sexual puns as Shakespeare’s -- e.g., the repartee about pens and writing letters
at Netherfield and about practicing and playing piano at Rosings, comes
straight from similar repartee in The Taming of the Shrew & Romeo and Juliet,
among other plays.

In other
words, Austen’s characters often speak, in polite code, about sex – and this is
perfectly normal, although Jane Austen could never have gotten away with it and
still gotten published if it were explicit. And, anyway, implication is also
subtle, as opposed to heavy handed (so to speak).

But I
agree with Elissa so far as saying that this constant winking and hinting at
sex is not intense, it takes its proper place in a narrative about real life,
which is that it’s always there in the background, but almost never (except in
the above-cited, rare internal arousal scenes) takes precedence over other
feelings and motives in a given scene.

Speaking
about sex in elegant, witty, punny code that preteen children would never
understand, and only some teens would either, is PG-13 at most, and therefore
perfectly acceptable for a lady observing the rules of polite decorum.

Diane Reynolds replied: “This article is quite fascinating and I am very glad, and frankly not
surprised, to see McCarthy is a self-taught scholar.”

Thank you
very much, Jane, for posting that link, I was not aware of McCarthy’s research and
I am as interested in all things Shakespeare as I am in all things Austen. This
really is a big deal, for exactly the reasons stated in the article – there may
well be more unpublished sources for Shakespeare’s plays than have previously
been identified, some as significant as North’s book, and knowing those sources
could shed fresh light on Shakespeare’s sometimes cryptic authorial meanings.

I have
a couple of additional comments:

First,
as Diane pointed out, it is indeed extremely gratifying to see another “eccentric” self-taught
independent scholar (who, per the article, spends 12 hours a day on his
research—that’s more than I’ve spent over the past 13 years, but not by that
much) make an impact. It gives inspiration to the rest of us!

Second,
in terms of scholarly approach, I really resonated to the following excerpt
from the article:

“Mr.
McCarthy used decidedly modern techniques to marshal his evidence, employing
WCopyfind, an open source plagiarism software, which picked out common words
and phrases in the manuscript and the plays. In the dedication to his
manuscript, for example, North urges those who might see themselves as ugly to
strive to be inwardly beautiful, to defy nature. He uses a succession of words
to make the argument, including ‘proportion’, ‘glass’, ‘feature’, ‘fair’, ‘deformed’,
‘world’, ‘shadow’ and ‘nature’. In the opening soliloquy of Richard III (“Now
is the winter of our discontent…”) the hunchbacked tyrant uses the same words
in virtually the same order to come to the opposite conclusion: that since he
is outwardly ugly, he will act the villain he appears to be.

“People
don’t realize how rare these words actually are,” Mr. McCarthy said. “And he keeps
hitting word after word. It’s like a lottery ticket. It’s easy to get one
number out of six, but not to get every number.”

That is
exactly the kind of argument I’ve made a hundred times regarding the importance
of very specific verbiage in establishing a non-explicit allusion by Jane
Austen to a prior author. It’s all about the clustering of relatively common
words around a related theme, and it is as much an art as a science in determining
if the allusion is real or not, and what it means.

That’s
why I am so certain, e.g., that Jane Austen, via the wording of her “Henry and
Emma” allusion in Persuasion, was
very specifically alluding to the passage in Sarah Fielding’s “Remarks” about the character of Richardson's Clarissa,
in which Fielding’s fictional readers discuss “Henry and Emma” vis a vis
Clarissa. There is common verbiage and content which takes us out of the realm
of lucky coincidence and into intentional allusion, via a kind of “tagging”.
Here’s what I wrote in that recent post:

“I assert that Austen
seized upon Mr. Dellincourt’s statement that

“nothing
less than the lovely Emma's Passion for Henry would be any Satisfaction to [LOVELACE],
if he was a Lover",”

and
tweaked it into noticeably parallel phraseology in Anne Elliot’s passing thoughts in Persuasion:

"Without emulating the feelings of an
Emma towards her Henry, she would have attended on Louisa with a zeal
above the common claims of regard, for [Wentworth's] sake."

McCarthy’s
discovery illustrates that Shakespeare did much the same thing – it is not
plagiarism, it is deliberate tagging, so that anyone familiar with the source
text would read through the lens of the work alluded to – and as the examples
listed in the article illustrate, that lens is often ironic.

I really
look forward to reading McCarthy’s (and Schlueter’s) book, so thanks again,
Jane, for bringing it to our attention!

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Jane: “I'm interested in the social context. Who gives large
presents of food to whom. Such gifts are mentioned at least three times in Emma
(Emma sends a large cut of pork to the Bates, Mr. Knightly sends them a lot of
apples, Mrs. Martin sends that goose to Mrs. Goddard. Are food gifts mentioned
in any of the other novels? How would readers at the time see these gifts? The
only other mention of a large gift (but not food) that I remember is in S&S
where Willoughby attempts to give a horse to Marianne. Surely someone has
written on "Gifts in Jane Austen's Novels."

Jane, apropos Willoughby’s
gift of a mare (we may safely infer the female gender of the horse by the name,
Queen Mab), as I’ve written before, Austen is broadly hinting to her erudite
readers about Mercutio’s very famous speech in Romeo & Juliet,
and also the Eve of St. Agnes, both about the sexual dreams (or night ‘mares’)
of 'young women of good carriage', in both S&S and Emma, as
I last elaborated in 2016: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2016/05/mariannes-galloping-dream-queen-mab-eve.html

Nancy: “The gifts of food to
the Bates are the sort of thing that landlords sent to tenants, richer
people sent to the less fortunate etc. Mr. Bates had been the
clergyman who had the church Mr. Eldon now serves. The church had no retirement
plans, no pensions so each man was responsible for putting aside enough
for his family after he was dead. Jane Austen shows many fathers/ husbands
who fail to do this. Jane's mother and father were supposed to help
out the Grandmother and sister/aunt.

Boxing day was one day such
gifts were often given if not any other time. The goose was probably at
Michaelmas (or Christmas) and was from the family of some students in
appreciation for Mrs. Goddard's position as head of her
school. Jane Austen's original readers would have understood
this as Christian charity and looking out for the less fortunate.

Emma visits many in the
village. Servants were usually given boxes on Boxing day Looking at
gifts in Austen is a good idea. Lucy gave Edward the ring with the lock of
hair. Emma gave Elton a picture. Knightley gave foodstuffs because
the others didn't have gardens. Elinor Tilney gave Catherine the money for
a post chaise to go home. The cross and chain in MP.

Have to think about
others- I think some gift giving is so ordinary we don't necessarily
register it.”

Nancy, you’ve forgotten what
is by far the most significant, high-profile gift in all of Austen’s novels –
the gift of the piano to Jane Fairfax! First Jane and Frank speculate as to the
identity of the donor –is it Colonel Campbell, or the Dixons, or just Mr. Dixon?
Then Mrs. Weston speculates that the donor is Mr. Knightley; and then Mr.
Knightley seems to put the kibosh on that speculation a few paragraphs later:

“This present from the
Campbells,” said she—“this pianoforte is very kindly given.”

“Yes,” he replied, and
without the smallest apparent embarrassment.—“But they would have done better
had they given her notice of it. Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is
not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable. I should have
expected better judgment in Colonel Campbell.”

From that moment, Emma could
have taken her oath that Mr. Knightley had had no concern in giving the
instrument.

In the end, we seem to be
told that Frank was the donor, but I’ve long asserted that it is equally
plausible that it is the same “donor” who got Jane pregnant via another
“special delivery” five months earlier –John Knightley!

And now I see for the first
time that JA indulged in a brilliant subtle pun ahead of all the gifts to or
for the benefit of Jane Fairfax in the novel, when Emma and Frank first speak
about Jane:

“I have heard [Jane] speak of
the acquaintance [with the Dixons],” said Emma; “she is a very elegant young
woman.”He agreed to it, but with so quiet a
“Yes,” as inclined her almost to doubt his real concurrence; and yet there must
be a very distinct sort of elegance for the fashionable world, if Jane Fairfax
could be thought only ordinarily gifted with it.”

I love that Emma calls Jane
“only ordinarily gifted”, because Jane is extraordinarily “gifted”, repeatedly so,
during the last 2 volumes of the novel – first, the Hartfield porker; then the
pianoforte; then the apples from Knightley; then the shawl from the Dixons;
then Mrs. Elton’s (rejected) offers of carriage rides, mail pickups, and job placement;
and finally Emma's (also rejected) offer of arrowroot.

That is just another
subliminal hint that connects seemingly unconnected passages; the kind of hint that
goes a long way toward creating the
pervasive aura of mystery that hovers over the novel from one end to the other.

And don’t forget another
“gifted” character in Emma ---Harriet Smith!:

“…Did [Elton] ever give you
any thing?”

“No—I cannot call them gifts;
but they are things that I have valued very much.”

She held the parcel towards
her, and Emma read the words Mostprecioustreasures on
the top. Her curiosity was greatly excited. Harriet unfolded the parcel, and
she looked on with impatience. Within abundance of silver paper was a pretty
little Tunbridge-ware box, which Harriet opened: it was well lined with the
softest cotton; but, excepting the cotton, Emma saw only a small piece of
court-plaister….”

Jane: “Thank you for the
context, Nancy. Sounds reasonable except that the money Miss Tilney gave
Catherine Moreland, though Miss Tilney was probably ready to see it as a gift,
was later returned, so I think that is a different category. And Lucy's hair
ring, going as it does between engaged people, is different still. (BTW, what
are we to make of Edward's not sticking it in the corner of a drawer?) It just
strikes me that we have those three large gifts of food in E (plus the rejected
offer of edible remedies for Jane F) and none in the other novels. Why nothing
from Sir John Middleton to the Dashwoods, for example? Quite possibly once
Austen had used the first to advance her plot she simply thought (consciously
or not) it fitting to continue with the theme (or do I mean motif or something
else?).”

Nancy: “The gifts aren't
enumerated in S & S though we are given to understand that Sir John does
give them game and other gifts. He is most generous and helpful and that is the
sort of thing that many did without thought or comment. Also, Marianne and
Brandon send gifts of game and apples and other such foodstuffs to
the parsonage. Austen's readers would have filled in those blanks.”

Jane: “I find it interesting
how Austen used such gifts in Emma both for the plot and for
characterization.”

Nancy: “I like your idea of
looking at the gifts in her novels. We may differ as to what is a gift but that
often happens before people refine their terms.

There are gifts in MP around
that cross and chains. Mrs. Norris extorts "gifts" and just walks off
with things. Doesn't Edmund give fanny a coin to send under seal to William
when she first arrives?”

Apropos finding any existing
article or chapter about gifts in Jane Austen’s novels, my first stop was
the JASNA website, where I found this recent, lengthy
article, “Small, Trifling Presents”: Giving and Receiving in Emma by Linda
Zionkowski http://www.jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/vol37no1/zionkowski/ I skimmed through Zionkowski’s article --it’s
not my cup of tea, because it does not go below the surface at all, but perhaps
it will be of interest to you.

However, from further quick
searching online, I cannot find any article or chapter about gifts in Jane
Austen’s novels as a whole – it would be an interesting study, but I do believe
that Emma is the Austen novel most
saliently engaged with the theme of gift-giving.

Monday, January 29, 2018

It has become a mantra of
mine that Jane Austen often, if not always, chose her most memorable passages
as the ideal places to hide, in plain sight, “trivial” hints at alternative,
subversive, significant meanings in her novels. Recently, I came across another
such hint, in a guest post by Kate Scarth in Sarah Emsley’s Austen-themed blog,
on the topic of horses in Northanger
Abbey. My attention was caught by Scarth’s reference to an equine detail I’d
never noticed before in Chapter 22 of Northanger
Abbey:

“[John] Thorpe’s
deficiencies reveal Northanger Abbey’s connection between equine care and
proper masculinity. His horse obsession extends to his clothes, which resemble
a groomsman’s or coachman’s, a not so subtle dig at his dubious claims to the
title of gentleman. Northanger Abbey relays
a message that, unlike Thorpe, hero-gentlemen treat animals, well, gently. For
example, while Austen tells us little about Eleanor Tilney’s husband, we do
know that his servant left a farrier’s bill (Catherine’s imagined mysterious
manuscript), reading “To poultice
chestnut mare”…While we see Thorpe abusing horses, in this brief glimpse of
Eleanor’s future husband, Austen chooses to cast him as a man paying to ease a
horse’s ailment.”

END QUOTE FROM SCARTH BLOG POST

I went back to the novel text
to find the full paragraph containing that entry for “To poultice chestnut
mare”. It’s this famous one, which describes Catherine’s stinging disappointment
as she reads what is on the pages of the manuscript in the chest in her room. She’s
been working herself up into an imaginative fever over the answers to murderous
gothic secrets she anticipates finding there, but then is sadly deflated to
learn instead that the papers seem so boringly mundane:

“[Catherine’s] greedy eye
glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible,
or did not her senses play her false? An inventory of linen, in coarse and
modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight
might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand. She seized another
sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and
a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats faced
her in each. Two others, penned by the same hand, marked an expenditure
scarcely more interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string, and
breeches-ball. And the larger sheet,
which had enclosed the rest, seemed by its first cramp line, “To poultice
chestnut mare”—a farrier’s bill! Such was the collection of papers (left
perhaps, as she could then suppose, by the negligence of a servant in the place
whence she had taken them) which had filled her with expectation and alarm, and
robbed her of half her night’s rest! She felt humbled to the dust. Could not
the adventure of the chest have taught her wisdom? A corner of it, catching her
eye as she lay, seemed to rise up in judgment against her. Nothing could now be
clearer than the absurdity of her recent fancies. To suppose that a manuscript
of many generations back could have remained undiscovered in a room such as
that, so modern, so habitable!—Or that she should be the first to possess the
skill of unlocking a cabinet, the key of which was open to all!”

For those not very
familiar with Northanger Abbey, this
is the second of three familiar passages in which, per mainstream Austen
scholarly interpretation, Catherine’s overheated Gothic expectations and
illusions are gradually (and appropriately) extinguished by three consecutive splashes
of cold water.

The first is Catherine’s
disappointment upon first looking into the interior of the Abbey in Chapter 20,
and finding all too modern, even antiseptic, architecture:

“The breeze had not seemed
to waft the sighs of the murdered to her; it had wafted nothing worse than a
thick mizzling rain; and having given a good shake to her habit, she was ready
to be shown into the common drawing-room, and capable of considering where she
was. An abbey! Yes, it was delightful to be really in an abbey! But she
doubted, as she looked round the room, whether anything within her observation
would have given her the consciousness. The furniture was in all the profusion
and elegance of modern taste. The fireplace, where she had expected the ample
width and ponderous carving of former times, was contracted to a Rumford, with
slabs of plain though handsome marble, and ornaments over it of the prettiest
English china. The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from
having heard the general talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with
reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure, the
pointed arch was preserved—the form of them was Gothic—they might be even
casements—but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination
which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for
painted glass, dirt, and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.”

Then, after the passage
with the farrier’s bill, the third is Henry’s excoriation of Catherine for her
ghoulish imaginings about General Tilney, at the end of Ch. 24:

“If I understand you
rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to--Dear
Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have
entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age
in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians.Consult
your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of
what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities?
Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in
a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a
footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies,
and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what
ideas have you been admitting?” They had reached the end of the gallery, and
with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.

In my 2010 JASNA AGM
presentation, I argued that the third passage is the epicenter of what is
actually Austen’s virtuosic ANTI-parody of the Gothic. I.e., the knowing reader
is meant to see past the apparent satire of Gothic imagination, and instead
grasp the tragic irony that such imaginings are all-too-apt as to the actual nightmare
of ordinary English marriage for wives trapped in a ‘dungeon’, an endless cycle
of serial pregnancy and death in childbirth, a nightmare cruelly ignored by the
patriarchal powers-that-be.

However, before reading
Scarth’s comment, I hadn’t previously considered, let alone analyzed, the
subtle but strong narrative emphasis on that particular entry for “a farrier’s
bill”. I now see that it’s no accident that for this entry alone are we given
its actual verbiage; that we’re told that it’s on “the larger sheet, which had
enclosed the rest”; and finally that it is on “its first cramp line”. By this
succession of subtle hints, Austen silently hints that this is, somehow, the
most prominent verbiage in all those papers; so it must carry especially
significant meaning, when properly understood in all its nuances. But how to decode
it?

Scarth cites this entry as
evidence for John Thorpe’s cruel treatment of horses, in stark contrast to the
benevolent treatment of animals by Eleanor’s secret beloved. That is certainly
the case, it’s a valid interpretation, but as I will explain, there’s much more
even than that in this line entry on a farrier’s bill.

In my opinion, Jill
Heydt-Stevenson came very close to correctly decoding this passage in Unbecoming Conjunctions. First she
analyzed it as follows: ‘This mortifying inventory gazes at her. It may be
permissible to spy on the sensational, but the passage exposes how it is
forbidden to look voyeuristically at the mundane, especially when it includes
references to the private parts of the male body, which the language here
personifies…’ She then noted the monetization of marriage which is implicit
therein. And at another point in her book, Heydt-Stevenson discussed the heavy Freudian
sexual significance of John Thorpe’s disturbing, even perverted, obsession with
horses in Northanger Abbey. However,
she didn’t connect the dots between the two—which connection, I now assert, is
the key that unlocks the deeper, more significant meaning of that entry.

To wit: just as John Thorpe
treats women and horses alike as objects of his physical abuse, I believe that
the “chestnut mare” who was “poulticed” was meant by JA to suggest not merely
Eleanor’s chestnut mare, but also Eleanor herself! Let me explain.

First, we know that
Eleanor is not fair-haired, from the following mean girl comments by Isabella
Thorpe:

“Oh! They [Henry and
Eleanor] give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited creatures in
the world, and think themselves of so much importance! By the by, though I have
thought of it a hundred times, I have always forgot to ask you what is your
favourite complexion in a man. Do you like them best dark or fair?” “I hardly know. I never much thought about
it. Something between both, I think. Brown—not fair, and—and not very dark.” “Very well, Catherine. That is exactly he. I
have not forgot your description of Mr. Tilney—‘a brown skin, with dark eyes,
and rather dark hair.’ Well, my taste is different. I prefer light eyes, and as
to complexion—do you know—I like a sallow better than any other. You must not
betray me, if you should ever meet with one of your acquaintance answering that
description.”

And then, much later in
the novel, as Catherine gazes up at the portrait of the late Mrs. Tilney:

“It represented a very
lovely woman, with a mild and pensive countenance, justifying, so far, the
expectations of its new observer; but they were not in every respect answered,
for Catherine had depended upon meeting with features, hair, complexion, that
should be the very counterpart, the very image, if not of Henry’s, of
Eleanor’s—the only portraits of which she had been in the habit of thinking,
bearing always an equal resemblance of mother and child. A face once taken was
taken for generations. But here she was obliged to look and consider and study for
a likeness. She contemplated it, however, in spite of this drawback, with much
emotion, and, but for a yet stronger interest, would have left it unwillingly.”

There is a subtle
suggestion in Mrs. Tilney’s not resembling either Henry or Eleanor, that Eleanor’s
complexion and hair color are somewhere in the middle between Mrs. Tilney’s
fairness and Henry’s darkness—and that medium would be…chestnut coloration!

And there is one more huge
hint of an association of Eleanor with a “chestnut mare”, as Catherine
worriedly waits for Henry and Eleanor to visit her as agreed, and attempts to stave
off the pressuring Thorpes:

“I cannot go [to Blaize
Castle], because”—looking down as she spoke, fearful of Isabella’s smile—“I
expect Miss Tilney and her brother to call on me to take a country walk. They
promised to come at twelve, only it rained; but now, as it is so fine, I dare
say they will be here soon.” “Not they indeed,” cried Thorpe; “for, as we
turned into Broad Street, I saw them—does he not drive a phaeton with bright
chestnuts?” “I do not know indeed.” “Yes, I know he does; I saw him. You are
talking of the man you danced with last night, are not you?” “Yes.” “Well, I saw him at that moment turn up the
Lansdown Road, driving a smart-looking girl...”

Which raises another
question-- was it Henry with Eleanor in that phaeton drawn by two chestnut
mares, or Eleanor’s future husband? I think, the latter!

But, putting that detail aside,
I want to now zero in on what I consider the key point, if we really run with
the idea of Eleanor as symbolized by the chestnut mare who is treated with a ‘poultice”.
The entry is written on ‘the first cramp line’, and that conjures up for me a
narrow space at the top of a lined invoice, in which there is very little room
to write, hence a “cramped” handwriting is required.

But Jane Austen, like
Shakespeare, never saw a pun she did not like, and so I immediately noted that
“cramp”, in Jane Austen’s time as well as our own, referred to a
muscle-tightening spasm, the kind which afflict athletes in hot weather, but
also, far more significantly vis a vis the pregnancy/childbirth theme of Northanger Abbey which I addressed the
JASNA AGM about!

And guess what---healing
cramps is precisely what poultices were designed for (there are numerous concoctions
to be found in contemporary veterinary guides) in Jane Austen’s era: both the cramps
in horse’s hooves (as the farrier’s bill suggests), but also for the cramps
suffered by women as a result of their bodies being the “phaetons”, so to
speak, of reproduction for the human race!

And last but not least, thinking
about cramps, and also wounds (another ailment for which poultices were applied
to both horses and humans in that era), I was then immediately reminded of yet
another famous passage in Northanger
Abbey, about the collective injured female body, which novels written by
women were uniquely responsive to:

“Yes, novels; for I will
not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of
degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of
which they are themselves adding…Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body….there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity
and undervaluing the labour of the
novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit,
and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do
not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such
is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a
novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected
indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in
which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best-chosen language….”

I would not dare to
attempt any further explanation of why I believe that the above passage is the very
one which Jane Austen wished her readers to eventually think of, when they read
that farrier’s bill entry on “poultice chestnut mare” (or should I say, “mere”,
for all the mothers who, like Mrs. Tilney, suffered). The ultimate Gothic
horror was the one suffered by women in their daily lives as the “poor animals”
of English society, and Jane Austen’s novels were themselves intended as “poultices’
for the psychic wounds which accompanied the physical.

Diane Reynolds: “A
very interesting discussion. Arnie, what “popped” in reading the passage in
which Harriet talks to Emma about Mr. Martin and her time on the farm that you
quote, is how much it suddenly reminded me of Elizabeth at Pemberley.
Everything is far less about Mr. Martin as a person and much about the money in
one way or another. It’s the farm that impresses her—the prosperity of it—far
more than Mr. Martin’s person. She also repeats twice that he is “obliging,”
signaling that she values that trait—another indication that she might be using
or less than enamored of the less-than-obliging Emma. We are meant to
take her speeches about Mr. Martin’s with as merely parroting what she has been
told, but I wouldn’t be entirely sure of that”

That
sure makes sense to me, Diane, well done! The conflation of man and lucrative estate
is very very similar. And, coming from Harriet, it does indeed have the scent
of irony – Harriet is “singing” a “song”, so to speak (apropos your later comments,
which I respond to, below), the ironic melody of which the tone deaf Emma
cannot “hear”.

Diane: “Harriet
hasn’t missed that [Robt. Martin] had bid more for his wool than anybody—like
Lucy, she has her eyes on the bouncing ball.”

Yes,
excellent once again! She’s no fool, and neither is he, they can both tell a
hawk from a handsaw, financially speaking—it is the staggeringly naive Emma who
doesn’t know squat about such things.

Diane: “I
also find it interesting that Austen repeats sing three times in a row and will
now have to go and look back at other evidences of singing and Harriet—I know
she says vehemently (not all sweetness and light) that she hates singing in
Italian because she can’t understand it—could she be angry because she knows,
as Emma does not, that Jane is a rival to her (Harriet) for Mr. Knightley’s
affections …”

And
that is your best catch, I totally blew by the reference to Harriet liking
singing in that passage! My initial response to you on that point is that I’ve long
been aware that “music” is code for “sex” in Emma. It’s most blatant in all the innuendoes about “playing” the “instrument”
(pianoforte), which is straight out of the Fanny
Hill school of sexual euphemism; but it’s also there in Mrs. Elton’s passionate
advocacy for a female “musical society”, and also (as you point out) in Mr. Knightley’s
anger at Jane being forced by Frank to “sing” too much.

I hadn’t
previously associated Harriet with that music-as-sex subtext, and so thanks for
bringing it to our attention! If you haven’t already done it, here are the
passages I just found which relate to Harriet and singing, besides the one you
quoted (are there any others?):

Ch. 7: “[Harriet]
had heard, as soon as she got back to Mrs. Goddard’s, that Mr. Martin had been
there an hour before, and finding she was not at home, nor particularly
expected, had left a little parcel for her from one of his sisters, and gone
away; and on opening this parcel, she had actually found, besides the two songs
which she had lent Elizabeth to copy, a letter to herself; and this letter was
from him, from Mr. Martin, and contained a direct proposal of marriage.”

So, how
very interesting that Harriet, for all that Emma thinks Harriet is an uncultured
rube, has actually loaned the sheet music for two songs to Elizabeth Martin to
copy. That suggests that Harriet actually has musical knowledge, and that she
performs! Harriet knows that Emma ignores everything that really matters, and,
under Emma’s influence, I’d wager that very few Janeites have ever noticed it
either!

And
here’s the passage you recalled, about Harriet hating Italian singing, it’s quite
complex, in Ch. 27, and chock full of sexual innuendo about “taste” and “execution”:

“The
other circumstance of regret related also to Jane Fairfax; and there [Emma] had
no doubt. She did unfeignedly and unequivocally regret the inferiority of her
own playing and singing. She did most heartily grieve over the idleness of her
childhood—and sat down and practised vigorously an hour and a half.

She was
then interrupted by Harriet’s coming in; and if Harriet’s praise could have
satisfied her, she might soon have been comforted.

“Oh! if
I could but play as well as you and Miss Fairfax!”

“Don’t
class us together, Harriet. My playing is no more like her’s, than a lamp is
like sunshine.”

“Oh!
dear—I think you play the best of the two. I think you play quite as well as
she does. I am sure I had much rather hear you. Every body last night said how
well you played.”

“Those
who knew any thing about it, must have felt the difference. The truth is,
Harriet, that my playing is just good enough to be praised, but Jane Fairfax’s
is much beyond it.”

“Well,
I always shall think that you play quite as well as she does, or that if there
is any difference nobody would ever find it out. Mr. Cole said how much taste
you had; and Mr. Frank Churchill talked a great deal about your taste, and that
he valued taste much more than execution.”

“Ah!
but Jane Fairfax has them both, Harriet.”

“Are
you sure? I saw she had execution, but I did not know she had any taste. Nobody
talked about it. And I hate Italian singing.—There is no understanding a word
of it. Besides, if she does play so very well, you know, it is no more than she
is obliged to do, because she will have to teach. The Coxes were wondering last
night whether she would get into any great family. How did you think the Coxes
looked?”

First,
I get the feeling from “if I could but play as well as you and Miss Fairfax”
that Harriet actually plays piano as well. Of course, it never occurs to Emma
to even ask, and it’s not in Harriet’s best interest to be explicit about such
an accomplishment with Emma, for fear of Emma recognizing that Harriet is not
the “nobody” Emma assumes she is.

My
first reaction about “Italian singing” is that in some way it is Harriet making
a witty joke that sails right over Emma’s head, as to some form of alternative
sexual practice. As we all know, Knightley advocates for old-fashioned “Englishness”
as patriotism, whereas Frank’s “Frenchness” is dismissed as amoral. So… “English
singing” would be mainstream heterosexual sex, but “Italian singing” – just use
your imagination as to what that might be code for. 😉

Diane’s
final reply to me: “I agree that the combination of the overt mention of the
Vicar of Wakefield and the walnuts should send us back to that text—whatever is
it that Austen wants us to discover?”

I
actually have a post under construction on the topic of the subversive
significance of the allusion to VoW in Emma
– at its heart are some very disturbing parallels between the charming,
rich villain of Goldsmith’s novel, Mr. Thornhill, and Mr. Knightley! But I had
not till yesterday recognized that Robert Martin’s gift to Harriet of the walnuts
was also inspired in part by the reference to the cracking and eating of nuts on
Michaelmas Eve which I quoted last night from VoW.

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A lovely bit of praise from my youngest (at heart) supporter in Seattle:

"...Two sessions were outstanding: Juliet McMasters on the more subtle, deeper meanings of "Northanger Abbey" and a Darcy-like young lawyer, Arnie Perlstein, who revealed his very plausible theory that the "shadow story" behind much of Jane Austen's work is the horror of multiple childbirth and women's deaths. I am a Jane-Austen-as-feminist person and this really resonated with me!"

Thank you, Mary!

"Arnie's theories [about Austen and Shakespeare] may strain credulity, but so much the greater his triumph if they turn out to have persuasive force after they are properly presented and maturely considered. That is what publication is all about"

"When great or unexpected events fall out upon the stage of this sublunary world—the mind of man, which is an inquisitive kind of a substance, naturally takes a flight behind the scenes to see what is the cause and first spring of them."--Tristram Shandy

About Me

I'm a 65 year old independent scholar (still) working on a book project about the SHADOW STORIES of Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays). I first read Austen in 1995, an American male real estate lawyer, i.e., a Janeite outsider. I therefore never "learned" that there was no secret subtext in her novels. All I did was to closely read and reread her novels, while participating in stimulating online group readings. Then, in 2002, I whimsically wondered whether Willoughby stalked Marianne Dashwood and staged their “accidental” meeting. I retraced his steps, followed the textual “bread crumbs”, and verified my hunch. I've since made numerous similar discoveries about offstage scheming by various characters. In hindsight, it was my luck not only to be a lawyer, but also a lifelong solver of NY Times and other difficult American crossword puzzles. These both trained me to spot complex patterns based on fragmentary data, to interpret cryptic clues of all kinds, and, above all, not to give up until I’ve completed the puzzle--and literary sleuthing Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays) is, bar none, the best puzzle solving in the world!